Martin Luther King Jr.: A TIME Forum

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AP

Andrew Young
Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., former mayor of Atlanta and current chairman of the consulting group Goodworks International I think that there was a kind of frustration on Martin's part that maybe he had not done enough—crazy as it seems—about everything: about poverty and about ending the Vietnam War. He felt that we were just beginning. He always saw it as a lifelong struggle, and we had been at it for 10 years hardly.

He felt that we had been lucky, almost that we didn't know what we were doing. He saw it as a long-term struggle and saw this as the end of Phase 1. He was trying to take the nonviolent struggle to another level, and we were not ready. It would have been a different world if he had lived. I think we would have moved a lot more quickly on some of the global problems in Latin America and Africa. He would have been in a position to pick up where United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche left off and mediate the situation in the Middle East.